Chapter 13 - The British Museum

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview on the British Museum. The British Museum opened in 1759 with the 80 000 objects collected by Sir Hans Sloane and the large Cotton and Harley libraries. Throughout its history, the Museum has recognized the importance of comprehensive documentation of its collections. Various documentation systems have come and gone, but a perennial lack of resources had inevitably 'placed the emphasis on the registration of acquisitions and similar fundamental tasks, to the detriment of the development of systems for the organization, classification and retrieval of information. Moreover, the operational responsibility for the documentation of the collections has always rested with the departments. The consequent disparate documentation procedures, particularly for indexing and inventory control, have in turn produced wide variations in the accessibility of information throughout the Museum.